When I'll Love You
by FangIsFexcellent
Summary: I love you when you don't wake and I hope that you soon will, and I love you as I save this, and I love you as you sigh, and I love you as I think I should shut down this computer and stop typing to you. A letter from Sherlock to John.


**I wrote this in about half an hour while on some excellent painkillers. Tell me what you think!**

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The first morning light's tangled up in your features as I write this, streaming through the window and slanting over your tired, resting face, eyelids fluttering slightly. I am next to you, and I can do nothing but continue the scratching of pen on paper, the tick of keys on a laptop (mine, for once), nothing but watch you and think about you in the starlight, moonlight, fluorescents, every kind of light I've seen you in and determine that you are just as perfect in all of them. The room smells thick with dawn, and the sheets are twisted around our feet, and I cannot escape the words that are scrolling across my mind in twelve-point Courier type, because I think I am in love with you, John Watson, and it's hurting more than I thought possible.

You're curling your fingers into the sheets now, the sheets lousy with your warmth and mine too, creeping your hands ever closer to my hip that's resting a mere eight-point-five centimeters from you, so close I can nearly feel your heat, feel your heartbeat, and I think that if I could I would run and run and run until I dropped and maybe died, because you terrify me, you elate me, and you make me feel things that aren't even possible.**  
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I'm just watching you now, typing without looking, probably making , horrid typing errors but not bringing myself to care, because your breath is twined up with the sunlight streaking in through the blinds and it's captivating me, drawing my attention like nothing has since the summer of my seventeenth year when I watched the light leave my father's eyes. There is a tugging behind my ribs and an ache in my chest, and I know that you, lying there pacific, you are responsible.

Because I have determined now that I will love you until I die, until you die and beyond that, however soon or far away that day will be, and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, because there are infinite scenarios that we could play out and only twelve percent of them end in happiness. The rest are tragedies, Shakespeare wrapped up in modern ribbons and dumped on our doorstep, painted with pictures of you embracing a gorgeous woman, of a fight where you throw a mug I got for you at the wall and watch it shatter with no emotion in your eyes, no regret in your stare, the slam of the door, the anger of a wordless cry, the salt of tears and the bitter, bitter tang of nights curled up alone. We are a tragedy, and I will love you until we commit mutual suicide, until most of our major characters die, until revenge is exacted and the females in our story are weak and we fulfill the textbook paragraph with tea stains around the edges, I will love you until the spine of the book cracks and falls apart, I will love you until some kind soul decides to tape it back up again.

I will love you through sisters and brothers and friends and people that I don't know yet, people swimming and people dancing and starlight in their eyes that will tempt you away from me, tempt me away from you, but I will love you until we sink, until we drown, until we cannot keep our heads above the water for a single second longer and we tell it that it has won, that we have been happy and this does not a tragedy make, and I will love you while we sink, hands intertwined, eyes still open and fighting against the salt water, I will love you until we take our last breaths.

But things do not all have to be so morbid, because I will love you until the flowers you planted in the windowbox bloom up and spill over, reaching their petals towards the dirty sidewalk below in an effort for escape, and I will love you when they retract into dried brown stalks to wait out the winter, wishing they had coats like the one I will wrap around you when it snows, though it is too big for you and most definitely not your style, and for that matter I will love you until that coat is too threadbare to be worn anymore and I will have to replace it, and until the cycle repeats. I will love you until my scarf falls into the mud and is run over by a cab, and you will laugh at me and and mock me for mourning it a bit, and even then I will love you. I will love you when I am sober, and love you when I am drunk, and love you when we are both drunk and kissing sloppily, holding each other's heads up, and when you are the sober one and holding me up, and when I am the sober one and carrying you home.

I will love you when I hate you, and when you hate me, and when I think that I would rather have any other person in the world than you for company, when I leave and I walk the alleyways of London and then when I come back to you and make tea, and we sit in silence for the better part of an hour and all of a sudden we are laughing.

I will love you when we are dancing, when you are the one who does not remember the steps the television show taught us and you are stepping on my toes and I have to lead you around the kitchen floor, practically having to hold us both up with the laughter that shakes us, and I will love you when you persuade me to sing, and when you sing with me. I will love you when I play violin, when I shake with the passion of it, because each note of it is for you, John, and I hope someday you'll understand that every breath I draw, every heartbeat that I manage, every day I live, every skin cell and night in and case and horsehair on the bow of my violin, each one is yours, and the rest of me as well. I will love you until you understand that, and even if you never do.

There will be the nights under bedsheets, and I will love you when the starlight is lazing its way through the window and we take no notice of it, because we are lost in each other, I will love you when we are like we were last night, how we are joined in a way that most people dream of, and the unintelligible soundtrack in my head is playing as you kiss me. I will love you when I shout your name, and when you groan mine, and when we are tangled stickily together with fingers pressing soft, pliant, skin and when night-birds sing outside the window and we think that they are singing for us, I will love you until they sing Hallelujah for us, and I will love you if they never once scream that melody. I will love you when you dig your fingernails into the skin of my back, as if you are trying to peel back the flesh to my shoulder blades and feel what is inside me, what is impossible to see unless we are dreaming, and I swear to you, John Watson, that I will love you even when I sleep, even if I do not dream of you and you do not dream of me.

I will love you when I manage to burn the tea and when you ask me how on earth anyone could possibly burn tea of all things and I will love you when we are shaking with laughter trying to scrub out the ruined kettle, when we must go to buy a new one and I accidentally set off the security alarm because I forget about the pretty trinket I'd slipped in my pocket to buy for you, and when you are the one that has to bail me out of a shopping center's holding area. And I'll love you when you kiss me in the cab ride home and thank me for the trinket anyway, though I didn't have to go to all that trouble for it.

I will love you when we walk, when we walk until we find something interesting, until we find wildflowers and a meadow you will run in, acting like a child on a sugar high and pulling me along until we come to rest in a knee-high grass that isolates us from the rest of the world, when our names get caught in the waving weeds and I tell you that we should just stay here for a long, long time, and you agree but say that you are getting rather hungry and we left the food in the car.

When we're running down an alleyway, escaping from a man that wants to kill us both, I'll love you, I'll love you so much that the only thing that I will think about is making sure that you come out of this alive and without a scratch on your sans the ones you have already gained, and even though will make me angry, angrier than I've been in a long time, and if I ever meet the man that is coming after us I will love you as I punch his teeth out, feeling them give way under my hand and thinking that every knuckle I bruise is for you because I love you so much it's pulling on the inside of my ribs as though I'm being stabbed from behind as I type this for you, something that I do not know if you will ever read because I'm going to love you as I mark it SECRET and love you as I password protect and it and love you as I consider hiding it in plain sight, printing it out and leaving it in the fridge, posting it in the drafts of your blog for you to find on a day where you're not expecting it and I love you while I'm not home.

I'll love you when I don't know why I love you and why I've stuck around this long, and when you ask me those exact questions and I'll have to respond with two sets of three words, both of them you can guess, both of them I'll love you as you figure out, and I'll love you as you poke your tongue between your lips the way you do, pull on jumpers the way you do, bend over a hurt innocent the way you do, stir spaghetti sauce the way you do, love me the way I think you might and I hope you do and the way that I love you, that I don't even understand all the way yet. I will love you until you take over my mind palace, since you are in a good bit of the memories already, propping up reminders of yourself in motive storage and bits of flooring that I never intended to pull up. You're getting there, John, you're nearly to the state where I won't be able to delete any memory of you, not ever, and I suppose I'll have to love you until my delete key disappears entirely and you ruin me and I will love you all the while.

I will love you when we drive to the coast, when you toss me in the ocean, when the sand is rife between our toes and I will love you if you are stung by a jellyfish and you are half laughing half crying as we drive to a hospital and I will love you even while you tell me the disgusting remedy to this situation and I will love you as you are stitched up and as I promise, if I ever find the jellyfish responsible, to personally feed it through a wood chipper, and I will love you when you laugh at that and when you wince and put a hand over the bandages you've been given. I will love you when I have a horrible headache that blocks out everything and anything but I will remember you and I will love you while I curl up and hope for it to end.

I will love you when it rains, and when the sun is out, and when the snow is so thick we cannot open our front door, when the stoop is icy, when storms lash at the panes, when lightning strikes the power boxes and we are left with only candles and kisses for hours at a time. I will love you when it is warm and you wear shorts and when it is cold and you wear coats, bundling yourself in, and I will love you when you ask to borrow one of my scarves because I loved you as I bit your neck and told the world that I would always love you, and I hope that someday you'll know my mind as well as I know yours.

I love you and it hurts and I love you and it's beautiful and I love you when your answering machine picks up, when you turn over and you breathe out and your hair is so mussed against the pillow you're sleeping on, and I lay one hand on your shoulder and pick out keys on the laptop with the other, I love you when you don't wake and I hope that you soon will, and I love you as I save this, and I love you as you sigh, and I love you as I think I should shut down this computer and make you your favourite tea and I love you because you are you, and you are solid and there and I think that there is no way on earth that I can ever stop loving you, John Watson, in this dawn-thready room in the early hours of the morning next to you, and now I sit and I wait for you to wake and I type, and I type, and I type, and I love you with each keystrike, and I love you with each second, and I think that if you only loved me back, maybe, just maybe, I could love you while things were just a little bit alright.


End file.
